


we know what we know

by flavus



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Established Relationship, Fluff, M/M, hamilton gift exchange spring 2k17!, references to domestic abuse, sORRY IT'S LATE omg
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-18
Updated: 2017-04-18
Packaged: 2018-10-20 14:32:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10664634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flavus/pseuds/flavus
Summary: aka, a study in tense:they loved each other (past tense). aaron wonders how he failed to bring that love into the present tense, and reminisces.





	we know what we know

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TheInevitableSense](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheInevitableSense/gifts).



> hi! i hope you enjoy this. i'm sorry that it's late :// and i hope you're alright with the ambiguous ending + more angst than fluff. i haven't been writing as much lately, so hopefully this isn't complete trash!

Aaron fumbled with his fingers, his warm flesh tripping over cold porcelain as he pulled a mug out from the cabinet.  
  
“Shit,” he muttered, blearily waddling over to the microwave before realizing he hadn’t yet put anything in the mug itself.  
  
He dragged himself over to the fridge and poured in milk, the full-fat kind he’d been saving - “You never knew when to take a good thing, Jesus, Aaron,” Herc sounded in his head, frustrated and -  
Aaron groaned. “Not now,” he whispered. “Not now.”  
  
Almost mechanically, he reached for the hot chocolate powder and placed it on top of the counter, gingerly putting the milk-filled mug into the microwave.  
  
(“Hot chocolate always tastes better when you boil the milk. And use chocolate syrup.” A smile, a dollop of whipped cream on his nose, an ensuing fight where both of them won and the victory was extra sweet.)  
  
He never knew how to get the echoes out of his head. Aaron plopped onto the tile floors of the kitchen, ignoring the soreness that sprang up on his bottom and letting his robe billow around him. He stared at his bunny flip-flops and let out a sigh.  
  
“It’s a goddamn cup of hot chocolate, for Christ’s sakes. And it’s past midnight and I can’t sleep again and here _you_ are haunting me,” Aaron muttered, rubbing his eyes and praying for some kind of mercy. What was he doing, talking to a person who was long gone? Who no longer wanted anything to do with him?  His deliverance came in the form of an insistent _bleep_ from the microwave, signaling that his milk was finished.  
  
Wearily, he pushed himself off of his spot on the floor and ripped open the powder. Some of it sprinkled onto his pajamas - “I’ll clean it for you,” a gentle smirk - _no_ , Aaron forced the thought out of his head.  
Mixing it into the milk proved more taxing than he'd expected, and he could feel the exhaustion of his day seeping deeper into his bones. He finished the cup off with a generous serving of whipped cream, and settled into a barstool, holding the mug in his hands, lost in thought.  
  
\---  
  
“You know, maybe your life would be a lot more interesting if it was a lot more messy,” Herc joked, nudging his boyfriend of a year playfully as he dropped his duffel bag on the floor. He raked his eyes eagerly across his surroundings, examining the condo he’d been in a million times and was now about to live in. _Live in._ The prospect of waking up with, singing to, and just generally existing alongside Aaron filled Herc with an inexplicable feeling of joy. (The closest he could get, maybe, was feeling like a balloon was constantly being inflated inside his chest, expanding limitlessly. He doubted it would ever break.)  
  
“Maybe you’re all the messy I need,” Aaron shot back, rolling his eyes.  
  
“I know other places we can get messy,” Herc wagged his eyebrows suggestively to elicit a groan from his boyfriend. “Like...the park!” he shouted. “Race you there!”  In a flash, he was running out of the condo, running toward the park they’d had a thousand picnics at, the wind making the loose button-down he was wearing stick tightly to his skin.  
  
“Come back,” Aaron whined before jogging after his boyfriend. “You have a nice butt,” he murmured under his breath.  
  
“I know!” Herc shouted back, a hint of a wink in his voice. Suddenly, he felt himself falling to the ground, collapsing on top of a pair of strong, warm arms.  
  
“That’s not fair - you don’t even go to the gym,” he said, pouting. “How’d you catch up that quickly?”  
  
“Magic,” Aaron quipped, and Herc pulled him closer for a kiss. They pulled apart moments later, realizing they were on a sidewalk and in the full view of passersby, and Herc saw Aaron.  
  
He saw the man he loved, the tiny scar next to his eyebrow only visible when he was within a five-inch radius. Aaron’s half-closed eyes, half-shut brown-tinted windows into an unyielding, stubborn, sarcastic, loving soul. The gentle curve of Aaron’s face, the pain lightly etched into the emerging wrinkle lines on his forehead reflecting his rough start with more than a dozen foster families. The man he wanted to marry. It was the ugliest angle possible, their faces distorted by their proximity to the ground, their clothes in complete disarray, but to Herc, it was made beautiful by the moment itself.  
  
“Hey,” he said gently, easing himself out of Aaron’s embrace and pushing himself off the ground, extending a hand to his boyfriend to help him up. “Let’s go home.”  
  
He couldn’t wait to make him the best kind of hot chocolate. The kind with boiled milk and cold Miracle Whip and marshmallows and Hershey’s chocolate syrup. The kind in the mug he’d found that said _Visne me in matrimonium ducere?_ .  
  
Aaron saw Herc’s eyes glaze over as the other man fell deep into thought.  
  
Marry me, he wanted to shout. I love you.  
  
\---  
  
Aaron blinked and suddenly the past faded away, the present flooding back, a lonely man with a mug that no longer meant anything sitting in his hands, subpar hot chocolate growing cold.  
  
“We were in love once,” he said, aloud. “We were.” Or, maybe they still were, whispered something in the back of Aaron's mind. Maybe he was the one who changed instead of Herc, and maybe they somehow forgot to change together. They used to sit and talk about their days, about what they wanted from life.  
  
If he concentrated, he could still hear the rumbling enthusiasm in Herc's voice when he'd said, "I'd want to somehow make clothes that are comfortable and stylish yet self-washing? Does that even make sense? I just - clothing is so important to me, it's a vessel to express one's personality, their style and emotions, yet also something that enables us to be protected. It's another skin we slip on, and some people don't have that luxury."   
  
As for Aaron, he'd talked of doing pro bono work around the world, especially on behalf of those deemed too young to come and speak for themselves. On those suffering domestic abuse, especially within the foster system.   
  
It had always been an unspoken fact between them: they would do this together. They were woven into each other's existence.   
  
And looking back, Aaron could see where things had started to unravel, right before his eyes - and he hadn't done anything,  _goddamn_ him -  
  
“You nag too much about things being clean - why don’t you want your house to be lived in?”  
  
(“Maybe because I’m just used to moving around so much that I don’t know what a home feels like.”)  
  
“I thought we were going to the movies tonight! What happened? Why didn’t you call and let me know that you were going to be late?”  
  
(“I fell asleep on my desk, dreaming of you.”)  
  
“I don’t feel like you support me. You rarely make it to any of my open houses or my fashion shows, and sometimes you shoot me one of your looks whenever I wear something particularly ‘unusual.’ And you just - you tune out whenever I talk about my upcoming shows and ventures! You used to listen to me for hours, and you know I'd still do the same for you. Any time, Aaron.”  
  
(“I’m just in awe of you and I don’t know how to say it. I don’t know how to speak because you blind me.”)  
  
“Why don’t you want to adopt a boy? Why does it have to be a girl?”  
  
(“I always wanted a sister - girls seemed kinder. Softer. Less likely to hurt me, less likely to be another person to run away from.”)  
  
Maybe he should’ve talked more, waited less. Should’ve told Herc everything on his mind immediately when he felt it, should’ve communicated instead of letting Herc take care of him, instead of watching Herc try to guess at what he wanted.  
  
\---  
  
“What’s wrong? Did your interview not go well?” Herc peered worriedly at his husband over the latest issue of _Vogue_ (too much blue this season; he wanted to do something different with his next batch of clothes, and maybe he'd be able to set up the meeting with that scientist for that self-cleaning thread -).  
  
“It was fine,” Aaron said stiffly. Herc felt something squirm in his stomach, a tight ball of - something inexplicable. He wanted - what did he want? What did Aaron want? (Why didn't he know how to make his husband happy, to comfort him? And -)  
  
“Are you sure?” He fixed Aaron with a knowing stare, and felt temporary guilt at watching him squirm.  
  
“Yeah, don’t worry about it, okay? It just - it’ll be fine. I’ll fix things,” Aaron said, and left it at that, going back to staring at the TV, not watching the program that was playing.  
  
Something in Herc snapped, watching his husband on mute, and he thanked whoever was up there in the heavens that their daughter was a sound sleeper and currently knocked out.  
  
“I’m tired. Tired of waiting for and watching and predicting you. I’m not a meteorologist, and you’re not the weather, and I’m just done trying to be more than enough for you when you won’t tell me what the hell you want from me! When you won’t tell me what the fuck is going on in your life, and we’ve been together for five years now! I’m your husband, not your potted plant. You don’t feed me and water me and just leave me out to fucking soak in sunlight! You know what, I’m out. I’m gone. Tell Theodosia that Daddy is taking a vacation, visiting a spa, whatever - I’ll call her later. _Her_ , not you. And you can call me whenever you’re ready to talk about things, which I’m assuming will probably be never based on how this relationship has gone.”   
  
There was silence for a moment, and Herc was barely aware of the TV blaring out some "breaking news" report about a celebrity, his breaths coming out louder than the TV itself. He stared at Aaron. Aaron stared back.  
  
Aaron sat shell-shocked, and Herc felt hot tears streaming down his face. He didn’t care. Grabbing his work bag and some money from the piggy bank they shared - “It has to be the classic piggy bank - Hamm from _Toy Story_ !” (Shut up, Aaron, I’m trying to leave you -), Herc walked out. He didn’t slam the door, but after closing it, he stood on the doorstep breathing heavily.  
  
“Goodbye, Aaron.”  
  
\---  
  
“It’s too late now,” Aaron whispered. A lone tear dropped into his hot chocolate as he stared into it, as if the answers were hiding below the whipped cream at the bottom of the cup, amidst the remnants of hot chocolate powder that clumped up (because he never mixed his hot chocolate right and it always tasted better when-).  
  
Suddenly a flash of neon green in his peripheral vision caught his attention, and he squinted at it to refocus the image.  
  
“I’m coming at four tomorrow to take Theodosia for the weekend - I’m bringing the divorce papers with me, since for all your lawyering you can’t finangle the goddamn things,” scribbled in Herc’s messy scrawl. Herc hadn't even been the one to give it to him; he'd dropped it off at Aaron's work, and his coworker, James, had given it to Aaron with a sympathetic look. At least Herc had chosen the best person in his office to share "drama" with - James was reputed as the best secret-keeper in the office and functioned as office psychiatrist. But Aaron had never gone to him, because he'd never talked about anything, anything that mattered -   
  
"Except with him," he realized. "Except with Herc."  
  
In a daze, Aaron walked over to the Post-it, located next to the landline, covered in an equally garish pink Post-it.  
  
“Call Herc,” he’d written on it, a reminder from months ago he’d never bothered to remove, tear-soaked paper laced with his neat handwriting.  
  
He reached for the phone. He picked it up, and dialed.

**Author's Note:**

> \- "his deliverance" being the hot chocolate finishing is a nod to hurricane in the musical, when hamilton writes his own deliverance & burr waits for it (he has to wait for his deliverance)
> 
> \- "visne me in matrimonium ducere?" is supposedly "will you marry me?" in latin & i figured aaron would know latin and though herc doesn't know much, he's learned a little on the side (mostly cuss words and playful things, as well as random food words so he can just surprise aaron whenever they buy mcdonalds and he tries to refer to the chicken nuggets in latin)
> 
> \- sorry again i don't know why ambiguous endings make me happy haha


End file.
